Execution Poems

Execution Poems is a 2011 poetry collection by Canadian poet George Elliott Clarke. In a series of lyrics, the collection gives voice to George and Rufus Hamilton, Black Canadian brothers who were executed in 1949 for the murder of a white taxi driver. The Hamiltons were cousins of the poet’s mother, and Clarke has previously written a novel based on their story, entitled George and Rue (2005). A former Poet Laureate of Toronto and Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, Clarke is one of Canada’s most revered living poets. His work chronicles the history of Black Canadians in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, which Clarke refers to by the name “Africadia” (a portmanteau of “African” and “Acadia”). Execution Poems examines the social context of racism and poverty that brought about the Hamiltons’ crime and asks how much this context has changed in the half-century since their execution.

Most of the poems in the collection are narrated in the voices of George and Rufus (abbreviated in the text to “Geo” and “Rue”) or both, blending the literary diction the boys have learned from “Eugene Onegin, Claudine at School, Sonnets/from the Portuguese, The Three Musketeers –/all the works of Pushkin, Colette, E.B. Browning, and Alexandre Dumas –/all those secretly Negro authors” with the local idioms of Black Fredericton (“Fredtown”).

The Hamilton brothers tell their life stories, beginning with an impoverished childhood in which violence against their neighbors was a daily reality:



“I witnessed all this:

“A boy's right arm stuck to a desk with scissors; a father knifed in the gut while shaking hands with a buddy; two Christians splashed with gasoline and set ablaze in a church; a harlot garroted in her bath; a bootlegger shot through the eye in a liquor store; a banker brained in a vault; two artists thrown into the Gaspereau River with their hands tied behind their backs; a pimp machine-gunned to bits outside a school; a divine getting his throat slit; a poet axed in the back of the neck; a Tory buried alive in cement; two diabetics fed cyanide secreted in chocolates; a lawyer decapitated in his office.”

Geo and Rue find themselves unable to put these experiences into words that will make them comprehensible or bearable. Instead, Rue sees himself as “A poor-quality poet crafting hoodlum testimony,/ my watery storytelling’s cut with the dark rum of curses. / / This is how history darkens against its medium.”



As they grow up, the brothers are forced to come to terms with the reality of racism and their status as second-class citizens. Rue, in particular, is enraged by this reality, narrating the bitter lines of “Identity I”:

“My color is guttural.
I was born in lachrymose air.

My face makes a mess of light:
It's like a black splinter lancing snow.



I'm negative, but positive with a knife.
My instinct? Is to damage someone.”

George is protected from the rage his brother feels, in part, by romantic and sexual happiness with his partner Blondola:

“Geo: Blondola is good, and her body lovely;
and she is lovely, and her body good.



Her skin be tangerine, dry like white wine;
her hair be deliberately blonde.”

Meanwhile, Rue has a more complex romantic life. In “Duet,” his lover, India, tells the story of their love affair in melancholy tones: “I miss the cool ceramic smoothness of your shoulder.” In the next poem, “Rue’s Blues,” India is gone and love has lost its power to console Rue. He turns to “black liquor.”

The brothers return to “Fredericton—fucking—New Brunswick” to find its racial politics worsened by the nationalism of the Orange Party. They:



“drift into Fredtown like so much black sky —
squinting at the frigid, ivory, strait-laced streets
speckled by dung of Orange politicians’ grins.
(Spy ingots of shit oranging the snow).”

The center of the collection is “The Killing,” a poem which narrates in retrospect the moment of the murder, Rue’s righteous answer undercut by George’s horror at the crime and fear of its consequences:

“Rue: I ingratiated the grinning hammer
with Silver's not friendless, not unfriendly skull.
Behind him like a piece of storm, I unleashed a frozen glinting—
a lethal gash of lightning.
His soul leaked from him in a Red Sea, a Dead Sea,
churning his clothes to lava.



“Geo: No, it didn't look like real blood,
but something more like coal, that inched from his mouth.”

Clarke underlines the essential similarity of victim and perpetrators:

“Geo: He had two hundred dollars on him; bootleg in him.
We had a hammer on us, a spoonful of cold beer in us.”



This serves to question, without ultimately undermining, Rue’s sense that their crime is rooted in racism:
“Rue: Here's how I justify my error:
The blow that slew Silver came from two centuries back.
It took that much time and agony to turn a white man's whip
into a black man's hammer.

“Geo: No, we needed money,
so you hit the So-and-So,
only much too hard.
Now what?

“Rue: So what?”



George protests innocence, testifying against his brother in an effort to save himself, and pointing out that his only motive for being there was his own and his child’s hunger:

“I had the intention to ruck some money.
In my own heart, I had that, to rape money….
Have you ever gone in your life, going
two days without eating, and whenever
you get money, you’re gonna eat and eat
regardless of all the bastards in Fredericton.”

George’s defense falls on deaf ears, and in “Trial I” he laments his inability to wield the white, upper-class English of the courtroom:



“My English is like fractured china — broken.
I really speak Colored, but with a Three Mile Plains accent.
See, I can’t speak Lucasville and my New Road’s kinda weak.
Ma English be a desert that don’t bloom less watered by rum.”

The brothers are sentenced to death by hanging, and they narrate their execution together. A recurring theme in the collection is the brothers’ inability to find the right words for their experiences, a theme which culminates in the “silence” of their hanging:

“Geo: The laws preach Christ but teach crucifixion.
Folks glance through us like we’re albino ghosts.
Rue: Hanging’s a lot like drowning:
The condemned pedal in air,
while constriction inundates the throat….
Rue: We will fall into our sentence: silence.”